eCampus.com aims to set online bookstore industry standards for savings, selection, convenience, and customer service. However, as a company, they wanted to focus on improving customer experience and quickly auditing/monitoring new website features. eCampus.com wanted a more powerful tool to observe user behavior and continually enhance their online experience.

Clay Pickens, Senior Director of Channel Partnerships, who has been in the higher education space for over 10 years, has observed, “The textbook market is constantly evolving, mainly due to the shift from print to digital content. It has become imperative to monitor our existing KPIs, but also elevate our analysis capabilities to foster a streamlined user experience.” 

Looking to improve marketing performance for eCampus.com, Jacob Strange, the Digital Marketing Manager, focused on increasing conversion rates, improving the customer experience, and boosting site performance and functionality. Thinking of the challenges he faces and the tools he needs, he reports, “This has been a long-term need. Our previous vendor did not live up to promises or expectations and their product support was not reliable. Customer replay, session analysis, and search were all things that we were interested in, but were not provided at an adequate level by our previous provider. We wanted a reliable solution that could give us actionable insights. We also were looking for a knowledgeable, dependable, and proactive customer support team to continue to alleviate customer struggle.”

Looking at his marketing challenge, Strange observes, “Textbooks are typically about the last thing a student wants to buy. Based on our demographic, it is essential that we continue to fine-tune our customer experience on the website to keep up with the needs of our savvy customer base, providing first-rate availability and pricing. Tealeaf by Acoustic has helped both my team and our customer service staff a lot with resolving customer experience issues by identifying the root cause of customer complaints.”

eCampus.com found their solution in Tealeaf by Acoustic, with Acoustic also working together with Pereion Solutions, a reseller of Tealeaf that provides implementation services, on-going consulting, and first-layer technical support.

eCampus.com now relies on Tealeaf for session reviews, analytics, and alerts to potential online struggle or fraudulent activity. Strange says, “We use Tealeaf to gain an advantage over our competitors in terms of customer experience and site functionality. Tealeaf has greatly helped our marketing, customer service, IT, and development teams to troubleshoot issues and improve site performance.”

Comparing the performance of Tealeaf to what he’s seen elsewhere, Strange observes, “Acoustic has a very helpful support team and great products. Whenever we have any questions, the Pereion team and the team at Tealeaf always provide timely and valuable answers and input. They’ve also been very helpful in identifying areas of improvement and focal points for us. They frequently create intriguing and informative reports and dashboards that we might not have considered.”

Customer struggle was one of the main areas of emphasis for eCampus.com, which can now easily replay website interactions to see exactly what the customer was experiencing. “This has been extremely helpful for us to diagnose problems and make optimizations. We can see how customers interact with a page, how deeply they go into it, and how we can optimize it. We are now conducting more frequent A/B testing than any time before.” 

Pickens adds, “We’ve been able to enhance our visibility with multi-variant A/B testing throughout the year. Previously, we would mainly analyze our usual KPI metrics, but supplementing that with the ability to review sessions on Tealeaf has allowed us to be more confident in our decision making. Tealeaf allows us to remain relevant in our ever-changing market.”

eCampus.com relies on the AI functions within Tealeaf. According to Strange, “We utilize AI to set anomaly alerts, and identify areas of concern or for possible improvement. AI is transforming our marketing primarily from a customer experience perspective. We’ve utilized Tealeaf to reduce areas of struggle for customers and make their journey as seamless as possible. It also enables us to evaluate the performance of different landing pages in marketing campaigns to see what areas users are interacting with and whether the page is accomplishing our intended result. Tealeaf is our main source of truth when we want to look into how customers interact with our site.”

“Tealeaf enables us to continually audit availability and estimated delivery date statements to ensure customer satisfaction. We also use the anomaly detection functionality to look for order increases or decreases that could help us identify meaningful market trends.”

Strange is pleased to report, “The insights provided to us by Tealeaf’s session review have enabled us to lower our average customer service email response times by 50%. Tealeaf has also enabled us to quickly and easily resolve issues and improve the customer experience, which has led us to the best online reputation scores we’ve had in our company’s existence. Our online reputation scores on several major sites have increased by 100% with the help of Tealeaf. Our scores have increased significantly, to up to four or more stars (out of five) across several platforms.” 

“Tealeaf is helping us succeed by giving us real-time insights and analytics on site performance. We’re also able to diagnose user issues and inquiries much more efficiently with the session review tool. We’ve become a lot more efficient and have achieved measurable results both internally and externally. Using AI, we now have better site and page optimization, a better customer experience, and more efficient customer service interactions.”